It’s inherently difficult to know where to begin when talking about the legacy of Johan Cruyff. So many of the tales that surround and define his life’s story almost sound so apocryphal that you begin to think Cruyff must be some sort of myth, a false idea – or ideal – of what an individual footballer can achieve, and the depth and breadth of the influence they’re capable of having on their sport.
Did he really have a bespoke shirt at the 1974 World Cup because he refused the standard issue with adidas stripes due to his deal with Puma? Or that the deal with Puma was notable in itself, Cruyff being one of the first with footwear sponsorship?
Could one man really transform a football club twice – as both player and manager – as he did at FC Barcelona? Could he really be the co-creator and embodiment of Total Football, a style of play that dazzled and enthralled the world, which very, very nearly turned a historically second rate football nation into world champions?
When he controversially left Ajax for bitter rivals Feyenoord late in his career did he really turn down a basic wage and instead demand a cut of gate receipts, being one of the first players to truly understand the value of the fact that the players themselves were the draw for fans, making him the pioneer of what we now term ‘image rights’?
Did he reject Real Madrid in favour of Barcelona because of the idea that Real was the club of General Franco? Well okay, actually that one is a myth. Cruyff – in his inimitable style – rejected Real primarily because Ajax tried to sell him to the Spanish capital against his will. Cruyff was not a man who liked being told what to do, so after threatening to retire or take Ajax to court, he headed to Catalonia instead. Those instincts for confrontation would be a theme of his career.
But as Sid Lowe stated in Fear and Loathing in Liga, the thing with Cruyff is the suggestion he could have chosen a club on political grounds felt like it could have been true, such is the mythology that surrounds him.
The rest of the above though really did happen. Johan Cruyff wasn’t just an idea, yet his story has become mythological. Taking literally any of those above events in isolation and applying them to an individual would raise them to cult status, that one man was responsible for all of them is barely comprehensible.
If you were only to consider his wonderful ability and trophy haul as player and coach, Cruyff would undoubtedly go down as one of the greats of the game: Thirteen league titles, four European Cups, three Balon d’Ors and an extensive assortment of further trophies and individual awards.
While the list of honours is in itself incredible, the word that has appeared most in the wake of his passing is ‘influence’. The influence on the clubs he’s played for and managed for is profound. Ajax won three European Cups with him, only one without him. Feyenoord won their first Eredivisie in ten years the season he made that switch from Ajax. Barcelona had gone fourteen years without winning the league before his arrival as a player, and had never won the European Cup before he returned as manager.
And of course it’s at Barcelona where that longer term influence has been most keenly felt. As a player, while his arrival may have been apolitical, his impact was anything but. His arrival was only possible after an end to the ban on the import of foreign players, and the 5-0 victory Barcelona enjoyed at the Santiago Bernabeu in 1974 was (again courtesy of Sid Lowe’s Fear and Loathing) described in a 1999 poll by many as ‘a victory against Franco’. Just days before Cruyff had named his newborn son ‘Jordi’ – Catalan for ‘George’ – the region’s patron saint. The team was long regarded as a vehicle for resistance to the regime, Cruyff catalysed that and later noted ‘[the club could be seen as] some sort of protest, everybody could be part of a movement’
Just by virtue of the timing of his arrival, Cruyff became indelibly linked to the slow decline of the Franco regime and a growing confidence in the expression of Catalan identity.
While those links are inevitably somewhat opaque and not a little stretched, what he did for FC Barcelona in terms of on field success is not, and can be summed up in two words: La Masia. The converted farmhouse had long been associated with the club, first as a social headquarters, then as living space for youth team players. But when he took over as manager in 1988, La Masia was to become more, it became the vessel for Cruyff’s vision of what football should be.
As a player, he could only – and in fairness did – transform what the team was doing right there on pitch, as manager he could transform everything. All youth sides would play Cruyff’s 3-4-3 system, and in the words of Oriol Domenech ‘The ball was converted into the only protagonist’. In the intervening years, La Masia has become venerated and as mythologised as Cruyff himself, becoming a conveyorbelt of talent.
In the year 2000, Louis van Gaal stated that he envisioned a team of La Masia products representing Barcelona and was widely mocked. Eleven years later, Barcelona won the Champions League with seven starters who had progressed from the youth team, playing Cruyff’s football, managed by Cruyff’s protege Pep Guardiola. The Spain team that started the World Cup final in 2010 contained six graduates, the winning goal provided by and scored by sons of the system in Cesc Fabregas and Andres Iniesta. Barcelona and Spain’s recent history is absolutely defined by Cruyff and La Masia.
On a personal level, Cruyff has had a deep effect on me as a football fan. I have loved football for as long as I can remember, but the Barcelona team managed by Guardiola between 2008 and 2012 changed me and my relationship with the game. That side’s distinct, unwavering style, built largely on a group of players that had come via the aforementioned La Masia absolutely fascinated me.
As such, that team didn’t make me just want to watch football, they made me want to understand football. That side shaped the way I think about and talk about football. For better or worse, I wouldn’t be writing these words on this page without that team…
Make no mistake, Cruyff wasn’t perfect. He was belligerent, prickly, confrontational and had more than a touch of arrogance about him. So many of his quotes have a virtuous ring to them, but their nature suggests a certain fundamentalism: There is a wrong way, and there is the Cruyff way, a distinction that led to many a falling out with his peers and employers.
But without those traits, Cruyff wouldn’t have been, well… he wouldn’t have been Cruyff.
To take just one example, in the wake of the Dutchman’s passing, David Winner (author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football) recalls the story of how a disagreement with first choice Holland goalkeeper Jan van Beveren prior to the 1974 World Cup led to the inclusion instead of Jan Jongbloed. And why did Cruyff persuade Michels to go with the aging, ‘eccentric’ Jongbloed? Because he was noted for his ability with the ball at his feet. He wasn’t the first ‘sweeper keeper’, but the move was a key point in the evolution of that type of goalkeeper.
Not one man has his fingerprints so clearly plastered over the modern game. Barcelona are Cruyffian. Bayern Munich are Cruyffian. The last two World Cups and last two European Championships have been won by Cruyffian teams in Spain and Germany. Regardless of your personal feelings regarding Pep Guardiola and his qualities, he is unquestionably the most influential active coach in world football, and what would Guardiola be without Cruyff? In the Catalan’s own – perhaps overly modest – words, he’d be ‘nothing’, a player who’d would have ‘never left the third division’.
That’s what has made his passing so distinctively… odd. Because, unlike when many sporting greats pass away, we don’t need to be reminded of what it was that made Johan Cruyff great. We don’t need to be reminded because Cruyff never really went away.
We see him all the time. We see him when we look at a ridiculous Manuel Neuer heatmap or pass completion rate, we see him when Leo Messi dances through a defence, when Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta suffocated teams with their relentless precision. We see him when a player advertises his new boots or a brand of underwear (yes, along with Gunter Netzer who joined Real as Cruyff joined Barca, he was first on that one too). His influence was – and is – all encompassing.
As an extension of that though, it also means that Cruyff will never really be gone. Not while ever there are so many coaches devoted to his principles, not while La Masia continues to produce such wonderful talent, not while goalkeepers become ever more required to be the eleventh player and not just a guy who stops shots, not while the kid in the playground attempts his first Cruyff turn and knows instinctively what it’s called, even if they don’t know its protagonist, and not while we can endlessly watch gifs of him leaving Jan Olsson bewildered and lost, attempting to tackle empty space with that very move…
Cruyff the man is now sadly no longer with us, but in reality he’s going nowhere. Johan Cruyff is dead. Long live Johan Cruyff.
Geoff Lacey 